ISRAEL Comments turned off

The Great Deception March on Gaza’s Border The truth about the latest Palestinian assault on Israel.Noah Beck

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

What would the US do if 30,000 Mexicans, organized by a known terrorist group, marched towards the Texas border, demanding to return to their ancestors’ homes, with many of the protesters throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, carrying fence cutters, launching burning kites that set ablaze US territory near the border, igniting tires, and even shooting guns at US agents across the border?

If the US used force to protect its border against such a “peaceful protest,” what percent of the 30,000 Mexicans would end up dead or injured? Would it be more or less than 40 (about .13%)? And how would the global media and human rights organizations cover these incidents?

Now consider the reaction to Israel’s defense against precisely this kind of assault on its sovereign border, dubbed the “Great Return March” and organized by Hamas, a US-State-Department-designated-terrorist organization. Hamas has acknowledged that at least five of its members were among those killed in the march. The number of terrorists involved in the related violence is likely much higher. According to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, “32 of the 40 Palestinians killed (80%) were terrorist operatives or individuals affiliated with them.”

If the “Great Return March” had any truth to it, the Hamas-organized propaganda offensive would have been called the “Great Deception March” because it is entirely founded upon deception. Incredibly, on April 6, an advisor to Mahmoud Abbas, leader of the Palestinian Authority (PA), himself highlighted the deceptive nature of the march, accusing Hamas of “only selling illusions, trading in suffering and blood.” Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Abbas’ Advisor on Islamic Affairs and Supreme Sharia Judge, delivered a sermon, broadcast on official PA TV, in the presence of Abbas, in which Al-Habbash accused Hamas of intentionally sending Palestinians in Gaza to “go and die,” only so that Hamas has stories of dead Palestinians for “the TV and media.”

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

A Broken Immigration System And the “fix” that would make it much worse. Michael Cutler

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

While politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties may have differences on some issues, you may be shocked to know that there is clear evidence that the leadership of both parties favor the continuation of the immigration crisis caused by the dysfunctional “broken” immigration system.

Americans have been duped into believing immigration is a “Left” vs “Right” issue when leadership of both parties essentially want the same thing.

Nancy Pelosi outrageously claimed that “DREAMERs are the best of the best of the best during a lengthy tirade. However, on April 17, 2018 Breitbart reported, ‘DREAMers Are Among Our Best and Brightest:’ Koch Brothers to Push Amnesty with Seven-Figure Ad Campaign.

That article began with the following statement:

Pro-mass immigration GOP megadonor billionaires the Koch brothers are set to release a seven-figure ad campaign to push amnesty for millions of illegal aliens in the United States, just months ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

The Koch brothers are hardly they only “Conservative” campaign contributors who take this anti-American position.

As I have noted in previous articles, politicians are not unlike magicians who promise to cut their lovely assistants in half.

The magician knows that if they makes good on that promise, they will go to prison for a long, long time and, even if they are ever let out of jail, no one will ever work with them again.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

For Democrats, the Iran Deal is Becoming the Peace Process BY: Noah Pollak

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

For the American left, the Iran nuclear deal is becoming the peace process—that is, a landmark foreign policy project of a Democratic president reflecting the most cherished liberal beliefs about the world, that is failing at great cost to millions of people yet whose failure cannot be admitted.

The political beliefs that marched liberals down both of these diplomatic dead-ends were the same. Democratic administrations sought to turn anti-western enemies into friends, terrorists into decent citizens, through diplomatic engagement, concessions, and money. They were sympathetic to the Palestinian and Iranian Third Worldist rhetoric of resentment and accusation, and believed that by acknowledging grievances the United States could prove its good intentions, open dialogue, build trust, and transcend old misunderstandings and conflicts. Layered on all this is the rational materialist worldview; Clinton and Obama couldn’t seem to grasp that some people prefer their concept of honor or victory to a higher per-capita GDP.

President Obama articulated all this perfectly in late 2014, as he began selling the Iran deal:

[Iran has] a path to break through that isolation and they should seize it. Because if they do, there’s incredible talent and resources and sophistication inside of—inside of Iran, and it would be a very successful regional power that was also abiding by international norms and international rules, and that would be good for everybody.”

The peace process and the Iran deal are the two great liberal foreign policy projects of the past 30 years, neither of them has worked, the sources of their failure are identical, and in both cases the left is handling its failure the same way: by denying it exists, by relying on friends in the media and in Europe to cover it up, and by scapegoating those who point it out as warmongers.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Texas Muslim Wanted to Please Allah by Attacking Mall “When I first became Muslim, fighting was a big part of why I came to this religion.” Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

Matin Azizi-Yarand had two cats and an older sister. He had taken taekwondo and piano lessons.

But while he went through life as a normal high school student, living with his parents in a home in a bland residential development in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, he was also plotting to murder as many non-Muslims as he could at a shopping mall. Unlike the green lawns of nearby houses, the Azizi family had a dead lawn. And there was something just as dead behind the high windows of its Plano home.

“There is a Hindu temple I want to shoot up,” Matin messaged. Then he moved on to plotting an attack at Plano West High School, which he attended and where he was eventually arrested. “School is a perfect place for an attack. Even a blind man could take 10 easily,” he gloated. His ISIS contact had told him that killing ten or a hundred infidels would be easy. “Just fire where you hear screams.”

But finally he settled on the Stonebriar Centre, a shopping mall in nearby Frisco. He collected pictures and scouted the mall. “The security guards don’t even have guns lmao,” he messaged.

Matin worried that the civilians in the mall might have concealed weapons. And he made plans for ambushing the one armed officer in the mall. “I’d actually like to make a cop surrender and drop his gun, then douse him with gasoline and burn him.”

The area has a large Muslim community and Matin didn’t want to harm the Muslim “sisters” who frequented the mall. So he decided to attack during Ramadan, “iftar time//to limit Muslim casualties.”

“No Muslims are going to be at mall when it’s time to be breaking your fast//in sha Allah. (Allah willing)”

His victims might be Hindus, his fellow students, or random shoppers at Stonebridge mall. Matin and his correspondent only worried about accidentally killing non-Muslims. They considered taking hostages to better weed out any Muslims from the Americans whom they would stab, shoot, or burn to death.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘Sweetbitter’ Review: Delectable Drama This series, based on the novel of the same name, follows a newcomer to New York and her entrée into the high-end restaurant business. Dorothy Rabinowitz

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

The charms of this drama about the world of a New York restaurant run deep and they make themselves felt with startling speed. A tale that begins as this one does, with a 22-year-old leaving her unexciting middle-American town to find a bigger life in the fabled city, can only suggest the beginning of a highly familiar adventure. That will not turn out to be the case here. The adventurer in question, Tess ( Ella Purnell ), will confront a toll taker on the bridge leading to Manhattan, a woman who utters two words—“seven dollars.” The traveler is taken aback—she’s not a girl with money to spare. That seems like a lot to get in, she tells the toll clerk.

“Seven dollars,” the toll collector repeats evenly, with no change of tone. We’ve seen this woman before, and heard this exact tone—she knows her job and it’s not to talk about the expensive tolls.

This briefest of encounters carries the first whiff of the subtleties, the perfectly observed detail, that distinguishes “Sweetbitter,” a six-part series based on the 2016 novel by Stephanie Danler. ( Stuart Zicherman was the executive producer and director.)

The first person of consequence Tess meets in her quest for a job is Howard (an enthralling portrayal by Paul Sparks ), general manager of a renowned Manhattan restaurant. A sophisticated, understated sort, he asks Tess all sorts of unexpected interview questions—the books she reads, what interests her—and he listens seriously to the answers. Howard will turn out to have a more complicated life than expected, but he never loses his status as revered authority figure to his staff—or his capacity to steal almost every scene. Almost, because “Sweetbitter” is remarkably rich in distinctively drawn characters.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Marx’s Apologists Should Be Red in the Face The bicentennial of the man whose ideas killed untold millions. By Paul Kengor

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

“We’re told the philosophy was never the problem—that Stalin was an aberration, as were, presumably, Lenin, Trotsky, Ceausescu, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, the Kims and the Castros, not to mention the countless thousands of liquidators in the NKVD, the GRU, the KGB, the Red Guard, the Stasi, the Securitate, the Khmer Rouge, and on and on.”

May 5 marks the bicentennial of Karl Marx, who set the stage with his philosophy for the greatest ideological massacres in history. Or did he?

He did, but deniers still remain. “Only a fool could hold Marx responsible for the Gulag,” writes Francis Wheen in “Karl Marx: A Life” (1999). Stalin, Mao and Kim Il Sung, Mr. Wheen insists, created “bastard creeds,” “wrenched out of context” from Marx’s writings.

Marx has been accused of ambiguity in his writings. That critique is often justified, but not always. In “The Communist Manifesto,” he and Friedrich Engels were quite clear that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: abolition of private property.”

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property,” they wrote. “But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population.” And this: “In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.”

Marx and Engels acknowledged that their views stood undeniably contrary to the “social and political order of things.” Communism seeks to “abolish the present state of things” and represents “the most radical rupture in traditional relations.”

Toward that end, the manifesto offers a 10-point program, including “abolition of property in land,” “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax,” “abolition of all right of inheritance,” “centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly,” “centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state” and the “gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.”

In a preface to their 10 points, Marx and Engels acknowledged their coercive nature: “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.” In the close of the Manifesto, Marx said, “The Communists . . . openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Netanyahu’s Intelligence Bombshell Should Spell End of Iran Deal By Richard Goldberg

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

It’s time to reinstate sanctions and ramp up the pressure on Tehran.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu dropped an intelligence bombshell on the world Monday and, with it, may have signed the death warrant for the 2015 Iran nuclear accord: Thousands of files seized from inside Iran definitively prove that the Islamic Republic has been deceiving the international community all along. The regime lied to the International Atomic Energy Agency about the existence of a nuclear-weapons program, and, in direct violation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), hid its massive archive of nuclear knowhow.

The response from President Donald Trump should be no different than his response to North Korea: maximum pressure until the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

In 2015, when the Obama administration negotiated the JCPOA, critics warned that Iran would ultimately follow in the footsteps of North Korea, which reached its own nuclear agreement with America in 1994. In that accord, known as the Agreed Framework, North Korea promised to freeze its production of plutonium in exchange for heavy fuel oil and light-water reactors. As it turned out, the North covertly developed a uranium-enrichment program, which, when combined with its unabated development of ballistic missiles, turned it from a national-security problem to a national-security nightmare.

Just two and a half years into the JCPOA, it appears Iran’s intentions are equally nefarious: It is using the JCPOA to buy time to regain economic strength while continuing work on ballistic missiles and advanced centrifuges until it decides to build nuclear weapons. The regime’s own archive, as revealed by Netanyahu, confirms that Tehran is on a slow but clear path toward nuclear capability.

Netanyahu’s revelation comes days before President Trump’s deadline for Europe to help him fix certain flaws in the nuclear deal or else face an American exit. For months, State Department negotiators have worked with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Berlin to find ways to force inspections at Iranian military sites, extend the deal’s restrictions beyond 2025, and curb the Iranian ballistic-missile program.

POLITICS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING:A ‘WOW’ Poll About the 2018 Senate Races By Jim Geraghty

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/democrats-2018-senate-candidates-trouble-poll/

Insert all the appropriate caveats: It’s only early May, this is one poll, candidate quality matters, we don’t know what big issues or scandals or events will alter the political landscape between now and November, etcetera.

But this poll from Morning Consult should have the National Republican Senate Committee doing cartwheels, as this is a terrific time to be a GOP challenger with a “it’s time for a change” message, running in a red state against a Democrat incumbent. The “deserves reelection” numbers for these incumbents are abysmal:
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Does this mean that those Democratic incumbents are toast? Nope. A bunch of these senators have managed to hang on in much tougher political environments than this. But it is conceivable that in a tumultuous year with low presidential approval ratings and a ton of House Republican retirements, the GOP does pretty well in the Senate races.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

No 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Panel Says Amid Sex Scandal By Christina Anderson and Richard Pérez-Peña

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

STOCKHOLM — The Swedish panel that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature said on Friday that it would take the extraordinary step of not naming a laureate this year — not because of a shortage of deserving writers, but because of the infighting and public outrage that have engulfed the group over a sexual abuse scandal.

The Swedish Academy said it would postpone the 2018 award until next year, when it will name two winners, making this the first year since World War II that the panel has decided not to bestow one of the world’s most revered cultural honors. The academy is involved only in the literature award, so other Nobel Prizes are not affected.

Though the prizes should be awarded annually, they can be postponed or skipped “when a situation in a prize-awarding institution arises that is so serious that a prize decision will not be perceived as credible,” Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairman of the Nobel Foundation, which governs all of the prizes, said in a statement posted online Friday morning. “The crisis in the Swedish Academy has adversely affected the Nobel Prize. Their decision underscores the seriousness of the situation and will help safeguard the long-term reputation of the Nobel Prize.”

Peter Englund, a member of the academy, wrote in an email: “I think this was a wise decision, considering both the inner turmoil of the Academy and the subsequent bloodletting of people and competence, and the general standing of the prize. Who would really care to accept this award under the current circumstances?” CONTINUE AT SITE

MEDIA Comments turned off

This NYT Columnist’s Celebration Of Karl Marx’s Legacy Is Beyond Parody By Garrett York

Posted By on May 4th, 2018

The New York Times published an op-ed Monday with the headline “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!” The piece was festooned with a celebratory exclamation mark, as though the mere declaration needed that something extra, like a Broadway production (“Mama Mia!”) or television game show (“Jeopardy!”).

The piece was written by Jason Barker, who is an associate professor of philosophy (!) at Kyung Hee University in South Korea. He’s also the author of the novel “Marx Returns,” so he writes fan fiction as well. In his article, Barker triumphantly declares Marx’s legacy to be a success because “countless books have appeared, from scholarly works to popular biographies, broadly endorsing Marx’s reading of capitalism and its enduring relevance to our neoliberal age.”

He then proceeds to describe the Marxist states which emerged primarily in the 20th century as “ironic,” based solely on the idea that Marx endorsed a concept in which there was no need for a state at all. How then does he explain the tenets of the “Communist Manifesto” in which industry, wealth, property, and even the lives of children should belong to the people as a whole? He doesn’t. This is philosophy where no explanation is needed. For someone who seems to be a fan of irony, he either overlooked or discarded the very definition of the term “state.”

But irony can be easy to miss. Indeed, as Barker’s article was being made ready for publication, a Marxist dictator was stepping across the 38th parallel into the very country where the professor teaches, in an historic event heralding yet another potential collapse of a communist regime.

As so many have done before him, Barker labors under the false assumption that communism has never truly been attempted in its purest form, and thus the term as well as the definition cannot be ascribed to failed states such as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the German Democratic Republic, or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

More irony: Marxist dictatorships labeled themselves “republics.”